Inspire Employees by Sharing Knowledge

One topic that I discussed at the 2015 Scotland Summit was the importance of sharing knowledge with others. Many people hold back and are afraid to share their experiences, failures, and knowledge with those around them. Not sharing your experiences with those that you manage and those that you encounter is the worst thing that you can do.

Ray Kurzweil, defined the law of accelerating returns. What this means is that machine logic grows exponentially in each step that it takes. Human knowledge without sharing is linear, which means if you take 30 steps in growth, you are 30 steps farther. If we take 30 steps exponentially, you can reach a billion steps farther. This law that applies the machine logic can apply to human knowledge if we share with others. Computers gain information and share it among sophisticated networks and continue to grow in the knowledge that it gathers. By sharing our knowledge among our interpersonal networks, my thoughts are that we can achieve this as well.

It is also important that we take the time to talk to those that we influence. One thing that I like to do with all of those that I hire or manage is share my influences and thoughts with them.

A few books that I share with my teams are, The Common Denominator for Success, The Three Decisions, Who Moved My Cheese, and many others. Your team looks to you as a source of influence. It’s always great coming into the office and having a staff member come up to me, telling me that they completed reading the book that I recommended and that they took a lot of lessons from it.

Sharing of our failures and our thoughts about them, can help those who we are mentoring to not fall into the same mistakes that we did before them. Providing these insights to those who we manage, also shows them that we are human and make mistakes. The power of sharing our failures, is that we own them, acknowledge that they are ours, and use them to better ourselves. This is a powerful way to inspire.